Birth and Midwifery

La jaunisse and « jaundice » are the same word, and only one of them still shows what it means. French built it on jaune, yellow, with the old ending that Latin -itia left behind for making abstract nouns, so the colour stands in plain sight inside the illness. English borrowed the whole thing in the Middle Ages, and on the way it picked up a d that was never there — the same intrusive d that turned Old French son into « sound ». What is left is opaque. Nothing a speaker can hear in « jaundice » says yellow, because the everyday colour word here is « yellow », which came down through Germanic and looks nothing like it. That is the ordinary shape of this vocabulary: a homely native word for the thing, an imported French one for the clinical version of it, exactly as with « cow » and « beef ». Jaune itself goes back to Latin galbinus, greenish-yellow. And both languages went on to make that colour mean bitterness — a jaundiced eye on one side, and on the other rire jaune, to laugh a laugh with no amusement in it.